


Blaze

by orphan_account



Series: Rush Summer [7]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Culture Shock, Gen, Rush Valley, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 08:05:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If the gods could ever answer one of her prayers, wings of black and white would rip from the flesh of her shoulder blades to slice through the fabric of her shirt and coat the floor in immortal shades of grey, hastening her escape upon a whirlwind of silver to distract the eye as she melted once more into the shadows. She is, after all, a being of the shadows, accustomed to lurking in the quiet, to reading silences as a musician reads sound, to seeing through the narrow lines of emotion and intent and never flinching from the darkness that clothes her and nurtures her.</p><p>Yet now the spotlight has focused upon her, the interrogation light bright in her eyes unused to anything but the comforting black, burning her face in its torturous shine. The blue of Winry’s irises reflect not a warm summer’s sky as much as a tempestuous ocean storm about to swallow her whole and drown her in waters frigid as the winters of her mountain homeland. The eye of the storm.</p><p>-------------------------------------------------------</p><p>Or, in which Lan Fan unravels the tangled web of her emotions, Winry begins to listen instead of speak, and Ling struggles to divine what they're having for breakfast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blaze

**Author's Note:**

> The story so far: After Lan Fan's automail arm broke on a visit to Rush Valley, she and Ling have been stuck at Winry and Paninya's repair shop (with a ten-year-old apprentice named Akihi) while the arm is fixed. The night prior to this instalment, Winry and Paninya took the Xingese duo to a party wherein Lan Fan was attacked by a transphobic individual. Due to a series of hints, Lan Fan has come to suspect that Ling specifically brought her to Rush Valley for Winry to assist her - and after overhearing conversation between Paninya and Winry, these suspicions were confirmed. Abruptly, Winry discovered that Lan Fan overheard the conversation.
> 
> As always, a gentle, humble reminder that this work is part of a series.
> 
> The 'god of the skies' note is a direct reference to the story in Weld. Might want to refresh your memory on that!
> 
> This was really fucking difficult for me to write. I tried not to get too emotional. As always, if I fuck something up or handle something poorly, go ahead and let me know.
> 
> Ah, some happiness for Lan Fan for once.

If the gods could ever answer one of her prayers, wings of black and white would rip from the flesh of her shoulder blades to slice through the fabric of her shirt and coat the floor in immortal shades of grey, hastening her escape upon a whirlwind of silver to distract the eye as she melted once more into the shadows. She is, after all, a being of the shadows, accustomed to lurking in the quiet, to reading silences as a musician reads sound, to seeing through the narrow lines of emotion and intent and never flinching from the darkness that clothes her and nurtures her.

Yet now the spotlight has focused upon her, the interrogation light bright in her eyes unused to anything but the comforting black, burning her face in its torturous shine. The blue of Winry’s irises reflect not a warm summer’s sky as much as a tempestuous ocean storm about to swallow her whole and drown her in waters frigid as the winters of her mountain homeland. The eye of the storm.

“Lan Fan?” says Winry slowly, her _chi_ thrumming around her, the ribbon tugging her close. “Were you li . . . hell . . . did you hear all of _that_?”

Curiously her vocal cords appear to have migrated to somewhere between her legs, while her tongue has elected to take a vacation dampening her back. Or, no, perhaps the sweat of the heated Rush Valley summer slicks down her spine instead.

At once Lan Fan lurches to her feet, and Winry takes a small step back. Her _chi_ reads less intimidation and more fear. In the brief window Lan Fan bolts for the staircase. Master Ling awaits upstairs. Master Ling awaits _her_. Master Ling—

Although she feels the woman’s _chi_ flare up behind her, she cannot alter the trajectory of her leap at the steps. As she angles her feet down, Winry snatches her wrist from the air and jerks back. Lan Fan senses her imminent arc. Her head tilts backwards, her tucked-in knees rising into the air, Winry sliding forward on the floor and her grip loosening in her abrupt epiphany. A moment, two, of hovering, and then Winry’s chest slams Lan Fan in the back and the two plummet downwards as dying fish released from a seahawk’s talons. In the air the vassal twists about. Curls in her limbs. Shoulder up against Winry’s. The collision shudders through her elbow and knees to rattle her jaw and nearly crumple her limbs. Perhaps a blink afterwards Winry lands upon her back. Instantly she collapses, her chin and ribcage throbbing and screaming in pain. She shoots out from under Winry to kneel beside her. Hands on her knees. “Are you all right, Winry?”

A dribble of drool leaks from the corner of the mechanic’s mouth. She blinks haphazardly, mumbling something unintelligible. Lan Fan leans forward. “Hip hip,” Winry slurs, “but wotcher there? ‘s that any shway to talk t’ a right Führer of thish nashun, eh?”

The vassal stares at her. Presently she grips Winry’s arms and pushes her down to examine the woman’s eyes. Under the light overhead her pupils shrink normally. Raising her head Lan Fans begins to call out for Paninya when she hears Winry burst out laughing.

“I think I’m f-fine, Lan Fan.” Sitting up, the mechanic rubs the side of her head, smiling sheepishly. While Lan Fan has almost flattened herself against the wall, Winry sits in a loose cross-legged position, languidly taking up space as if not realising it. “Sorry, bad joke. But—” Her fingers clench around Lan Fan’s wrist. “—you’re _not_ leaving again, you hear me?”

“I _won’t_ ,” she snaps with a sudden surge of fury that surprises both of them enough for Winry to let go and return her hand to her lap. Panting, Lan Fan smashes her fist against the floor. Something has fallen off of a shelf inside her and caught on fire, spiralling outwards in ravenous flame that alights her fingertips and sears her throat. “I’m tired of running away from your nosiness! I’m tired of _all_ of you taking me on as a pet project. Do you feel _sorry_ for my automail arm? Or for my birthplace in Xing? Because I could survive off of my pride in my country alone. Or because I’m a _woman_? Because I decided that years ago, and if Master Ling gave me half a second’s grief on it, I would have left in the desert or in damn Amestris.” She shudders, but her eyes are dry, dry as the span of arid sand stretching endlessly between her home and this hellish land, her voice low and rough with an unadulterated wrath.

“In Xing, I would have had my arm repaired by now. And though I freely admit my fault in sleuthing, I’m starting to suspect that the reason it’s been so long since my automail broke is that all of you are trying to _help_ me. Are trying to _fix_ me. As if I’m _broken_.” The tendons in the back of her hand ache against her skin as if threatening to cleave through her flesh; the inside of her palm is suddenly wet, her nails breaking to blood that smears swipes of scarlet pain on the floor. “Why the _hell_ did you think that some affluent pretty girl with a fiancé _and_ a girlfriend who has never killed in her life could somehow _fix_ a nonexistent problem?” Winry has clapped her hand over her mouth, but here she parts her lips to speak, and a whorling inferno of a foreign fury spills from Lan Fan’s tongue: “What did Master Ling tell you? What did Master Ling _tell_ you?”

Her knuckles connect to Winry’s cheek before she recognises the movement of her muscle. A splatter of crimson swathes the lower half of Winry’s face, her pupils dilated to somber orbs of terror.

“Lan Fan.” The name hangs in the thick air. A red droplet traces the curve of Winry’s cheek and chin, marking a teardrop ring in the woman’s trembling outstretched palm. “Oh God. Oh _God_ I’m so sorry.” Tears well up shiny-wet in the whites of her eyes, filming over the blue as though she were going blind. Glistening grief mingles with the blood on her face. She brings her hands to her eyes, rubbing them with the heels. “L-ling was worried that you’d gone all silent over in Xing. That you’d lost yourself somewhere along the way, or that you were hurting and wouldn’t tell him, and I was scared for you because I love you, Lan Fan—”

The name. This time the word harpoons her abdomen and wrenches its sickle-head out, shearing her entrails with it, pink and brown and moist slipping through her wound and her fingers to coil on the ground in vile, twisted things.

“—so I asked him to bring you over here so I could—” She chokes on a sob and swallows heavily, blinking blearily, her lashes black shadows beneath her eyes. “—so I could, fine, so I could _help_ you out. Not to _fix_ you, Lan Fan, but you don’t have to do it alone. Ed didn’t d-do it alone.I didn’t do it alone. I th-thought that the court might’ve—th-that all of that whore shit they kept calling you—might’ve gone to your head, you know, and I was so afraid of l-losing you that—”

“Why,” Lan Fan asks in a voice dead and frozen as a subterranean glacier wintering amid its sea of isolation, her lips breathing out the _ww_ as the sound of _wú_ , “are you crying?”

Winry slaps her, hard and fast. The abrupt pain shakes her bones. “Because you’re an idiot who won’t, and someone has to cry _for_ you. Ugh! You’re just like Ed!”

Someone. Crying for her. Crying for _her_. Not crying for the Emperor or crying because he would require a new vassal or crying due to the horror of the bloodied stump of her arm, the rest tied to some dog in a cruel metaphor for who _she_ was, the Xingese dog, the Emperor’s secret weakness, the potential downfall of Xing wrapped up in an excess of yin. Someone crying for _her_. The anger ebbs away in a single fading wave, leaves her cold and wet and numb. Thoughts spin about like bladed discs cutting away at the inside of her mind, exposing her innards to the harsh light of day, and somehow she translates her intent, her emotion, her _chi_ into Xingese and then into Amestris. “I’m sorry for listening in on the conversation, but thank you.”

Winry’s gaze focuses on hers within the second. “Thank you?” At some unspoken signal between them, she reverts to a more snappish tone, although the bite has seeped away at the edges. “For what? Not beating you senseless for sneakin’ around like that?” When she tries a smirk, her lips crack, mixing in more crimson into the diluted, distilled misery-and-pain still dripping from her chin. Lan Fan’s palm stings.

“You mentioned me.” Her tongue languishes thick and heavy between her teeth, weighed down with the taste of copper and salt. “When you were talking to—to your grandmother, you said _Ling and Lan Fan_.”

“Well, sure, I mean.” Winry wipes her mouth off with a damp handkerchief pulled from a pocket.

“You were coming, weren’t you? And there you were.”

She offers the cloth to Lan Fan, who closes her fingers into a fist instead. “No. Let . . . let me explain.” Tightening her jaw, she seeks out a language in careful precision. In Xingese her heart races out in jumbled, tattered scraps or in the iciest of silences that stretch out forever in a sheet of ice so broad she couldn’t break it if she tried. But in Amestrisian her thoughts march out in fixed orders, in columns, in regiments of steel-spine soldiers awaiting her every command. “Even the people I would consider to be my allies, such as Edward or May, usually refer to Ling for the both of us. They know that I will go wherever he goes. And as his retainer, I understand. Thus I was—I was confused when you sought to mention me specifically.” Again, the gentle brushing of the lips on the _ww_. Some deep instinct within her begs her to curve them in the sharp _uu_ , but her mouth opens wide for the _ii_. “Why?”

“Because, dummy, you’re a person too.” Scooting closer, Winry embraces her, the circumscription of her arms enclosing a warm space around her heart. Her hands Lan Fan’s palm has ceased to bleed, although it still twinges with mild whispers of pain. “You’re a person too, okay? You’re _the_ person. God, I’m sorry. I started thinking of you as a little checklist of problems I had to help you with, like a jigsaw puzzle I had to fit back together. Somewhere, somewhere, I think, I stopped seeing you as _Lan Fan_ , and God, I’m sorry.”

Lan Fan rests her forehead on Winry’s collarbone. “Thank you.” Behind them: Applause. Jolting, she frantically dives into the _chi_ to sense Akihih at the doorway of the kitchen, Paninya at that of the workroom, Ling at the top of the stairs. “H-how much of that . . .”

Ling cocks his head to one side. “Enough.” His grin could light the stars. “More than enough.” He takes the steps two at a time, pausing at the bottom. Their gazes find one another as two ships passing through the obscured night, somehow drawn together by an unseen hand. “Lan Fan.” His voice, deep and rich, flooding the room like that of the god of the skies. She lowers her eyelids, and he understand her silent request. His tone brightens, lightens, feathers up into a child’s pitch. “But first! Breakfast, and fast. Aki, what’s cookin’? I hope it’s roast duck, eh?”


End file.
